Apartment-dwellers

I am an apartment-dweller in a city. The soundscape of other beings is familiar and comforting to me: vegetable-chopping and floor-vacuuming, TV and stereo, brawling children, whining dogs, love-making and arguments. Add the whirr of traffic, the fart and groan of bus and the rattle of train, occasionally a live musical instrument: these sounds remind me I am alive with others, we are together in this experiment, living and dying. We try to pay our bills (never easy), gratify our needs, be useful and somehow relevant. We try to create meaningful lives, each in our own way. We amass our stories, our failures, our dreams. We are bumbling fools with (mostly) good intentions. We make, from the limited options available, the best choices we can. After choosing we experience remorse, regret, or (occasionally) short-lived satisfaction before we go on to the next dilemma. Mostly we doubt ourselves, we feel inadequate, we wish we were smarter, quicker, fitter, thinner, better-looking, more highly skilled, more worthy. We wonder if we chose the wrong field, the wrong job, if we should have seen it coming. Some of us blame others. Some of us blame ourselves. Some of us tremble in wonder at the privilege of being still alive, the joy that there are people who love us, despite how undeserving we are.

I love us so much, I ache with it sometimes.